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6 Slides Your MC Needs in Their Talk Track

Connecting the Physical and Digital Experiences

A question we often hear from our customers is how to drive more app adoption and engagement at their events. We know they spend a ton of time and energy producing app promotion kits, event signage and more to drive adoption, but what else can you do?

At LIVE 2016 we decided to put a few of our own theories to the test and use the event host as the key to connecting the physical and digital experiences. We started by asking ourselves which event app features would give us the right insights to better inform our own marketing strategy and worked our way backward from there. With that in mind, we planned out when we’d incorporate specific calls-to-action such as: before and after sessions, introducing and coming back from breaks, and more.

Update Your Profile

Our primary goal was to use our event app to drive in-person connections and live meetings. To do this effectively, it helps to know who you’re engaging with. Our first ask onstage was that everyone add a photo of themselves to their profile and ensure their information was complete. It’s as easy as importing your profile from LinkedIn, updating a few fields, and connecting to your preferred social networks.

Join Topic Channels

Topic Channels are a global experience for every attendee. For our own event, we chose three topics (themes) we wanted people to focus on: Accelerating Careers, Future of Event Tech, and Live Engagement Marketing. These topics came out of our larger event themes and content for the day, so we wanted to ensure people had a place to go to share ideas, best practices, and key learnings around each.

Focus on Quality Over Quantity

We often find incentivizing engagement can sometimes lead to a spammy Activity Feed - and no one wants that! To combat the wrong kind of in-app behavior, your host should finish their opening by reminding attendees of the kind of posts you hope to see and what quality looks like to you. This will likely be different depending on your specific event goals, but you’ll find that simple onstage education will drive incredible results.

Ask Questions in the Session Channel

If you’re running any kind of Q&A or panel-style session, the Session Channel is a great place to curate questions for the moderator. We also use the Session Channel as a way to better understand what types of questions our audience has around specific content tracks and create content for them from that. This post is a great example of that!

Rate and Review Sessions

The best way for us to improve our content and events strategy is by getting real-time feedback while it’s fresh in our audience’s mind, rather than after the event has concluded. To increase response rates and give us an accurate view of attendee interest in specific topics and speakers, we made sure to give them time to rate and review sessions immediately after they end.

Check Your Direct Messages

Since a primary goal for us was to drive the kind of face-to-face connections only a live event can provide, it was important that people not only engaged with one another on the Activity Feed, but that they also met in-person. To do this, we asked our attendees to set up 1:1 Meetings with our onsite staff which consisted of our executive, sales and customer experience teams. This, in turn, helps to drive new and recurring revenue for the business and better enables our team to track ROI from the event.

What’s In It For Your Attendees?

With each ask, it was important for us to focus on the why behind it. At the end of the day, each onstage call-to-action is designed to give our team the kind of insight we need to better serve our audience — both at our events and in our broader marketing and business strategy. By reminding our attendees we’re here to serve them, we were able to glean new insights into which topics we should cover more deeply and where we can spend less time.

Of course, you’ll want to start by asking yourself which event app features will give you the insights you need to inform your own business strategy, but this is a good place to start!